This is the 'Bible' for the many enthusiasts of British Naval history in the age of Nelson. What Sir Charles Oman did for the Peninsular War, William James (d.1827) did for the Napoleonic Wars at sea: writing a comprehensive, massively detailed account of the real-life actions that lay behind the fiction of C. S. Forester and Patrick O'Brian. James had the advantage of writing at the time of the events he describes so well, and wrote hundreds of letters to survivors of the wars at sea, as well as scrutinising every despatch, ship's log, foreign report and private narrative that he could lay...